Lakarie Swanigan set goals for herself this spring. She wanted to improve her time at the 4×400 meter and 4×800 meter relay events.
But one thing she didn’t have to think about? Her shoes.
That’s not always been the case for the track athletes at Purdue Polytechnic High School, coach Nicole Schadek said. Not long before Swanigan joined the team, Schadek kept a container of spare, used shoes for some of her athletes. Some on the team would trade pairs with one another before events so they had the specialty spikes they needed to be competitive.
That’s why the contribution of a growing central Indiana nonprofit has been so valuable, Schadek said. When New Shoe Day learned of her team’s needs, the nonprofit stepped up with dozens of new pairs of shoes — including Swanigan’s spikes.
How to get involved with New Shoe Day
📩 Connect: Visit newshoeday.org/contact to get updates on New Shoe Day.
👟 Partner: Email nsd@newshoeday.org for partnership opportunities.
💵 Donate: See New Shoe Day’s website to learn how to donate money.
👩💻 Follow: You can find New Shoe Day on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
“They feel different. It’s lighter than other shoes and it makes you go faster,” said Swanigan, who just finished her second year on the track team. “I’m grateful that we have New Shoe Day, because I probably would not have gotten that pair of spikes.”
New Shoe Day, which grew from an idea in 2020, has donated more than 7,000 shoes to kids and teens across central Indiana.
The goal is to make it easier for youth to get active, especially if they wouldn’t be able to participate otherwise. They also center mental health in their conversations with school groups and sports teams.
But, for its leaders, New Shoe Day is more than a social service provider. It’s a movement.
“It’s a gateway to so much for a kid,” co-founder Casey Crouse said. “It empowers them to participate in gym class or physical education-type activities or sign up for that team or, we say, ‘just be a kid.’”
New Shoe Day started with random acts of kindness
New Shoe Day launched out of a challenge made by a group of Indy-area runners in the summer of 2020: Run 10 miles for 100 days, each in a different Indianapolis neighborhood.
Their purpose was to show community strength in response to social distancing during the pandemic and to the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd.
They documented their runs on social media and added in random acts of kindness along the way — small gifts, like a water bottle with a note and a little money, for people who they encountered on their path. They called those days with gifts a “new shoe day,” after the confidence and joy a runner feels when they break in a new pair of shoes.
As the group took to Indy’s streets, neighbors began to notice — and some asked how they could help. Though not an initial goal of the group, the runners began accepting donations through a GoFundMe account, and those donations started to add up.
At the end of their 100 days, the group wrote a $4,500 check to Beyond Monumental — the nonprofit arm affiliated with some of the city’s largest distance running events, such as the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon. But, the running community that came together through the new shoe days remained.
So, with time, Crouse and some leaders of the group established a nonprofit to continue the runs and to keep giving back.
Each partner comes with a different need
New Shoe Day doesn’t just partner with schools and athletic teams; the nonprofit also partners with community groups.
The Latinas Welding Guild, for example, needed work boots for its youth summer camp last year. Girls Inc. needed footwear to help stock a new community closet.
New Shoe Day started out using what’s called a dropshipping model, meaning the nonprofit doesn’t warehouse the shoes. Instead, New Shoe Day takes requests from community partners and works with a third-party retailer for shoe orders and direct delivery.
Most of the work is led by New Shoe Day’s volunteer board — a passion project that the team coordinates outside of its regular work hours. And, many of the group’s partnerships have grown organically through referrals or relationships in the running community.
There’s also been happenstance meetings. That’s how Broad Ripple Middle School physical education teacher Trenton Vickrey and Crouse connected.
Shifting to shoe banks
The two had met once before when Vickrey worked at another school. But, when Crouse stopped in last winter to the Athletic Annex store where Vickrey worked part time, the two reconnected.
Vickrey told Crouse about his classes. Some of his students, he told Mirror Indy, had to sit out of P.E. at the start of the year because they didn’t own the right shoes. He recalled one week last fall when five kids showed up wearing Crocs or boots.
“Initially I thought, ‘You knew you were coming to P.E., why didn’t you come prepared?’” Vickrey said. “Through talking to them, I realized these are the only shoes they had.”
Vickrey told Crouse about the small shoe bank he’d tried to start on his own. He collected just four or five used pairs from other runners he knew and let his students wear them for gym class. By the spring, New Shoe Day provided him brand new shoes in all the needed sizes.
The sets were so nice that even kids with the proper footwear were asking to use the new shoes. He said the experience has normalized changing shoes before class so no one student feels like they stand out.
“No matter what, they can exercise now,” Vickrey said.
Visions for the future
And, with each new partnership, the word is spreading.
Vickrey said he wants to help coordinate other shoe banks in Indianapolis Public Schools.
New Shoe Day, which is based in Carmel, has already launched 11 shoe banks across central Indiana and another in the Evansville area. The nonprofit also hired its first full-time employee last month, and is working to further organize its volunteer efforts.
It’s part of a long-term vision Crouse sees as taking the New Shoe Day model statewide.
“We are trying very hard to scale this to do well beyond what you see it as today,” Crouse said. “I’m just super motivated because I can see the potential of what we can do.”
In Indianapolis, the nonprofit’s work is already making a difference. Schadek, the coach at Purdue Polytechnic, said she’s been able to grow her team since New Shoe Day stepped in. She went from having about 11 athletes on her team to fielding a full roster.
“If I didn’t have shoes to provide to them, they wouldn’t be able to do it or they wouldn’t have a good reason to feel like they’re a part of anything,” she said. “To have shoes for each of them is just a huge blessing.”
Mirror Indy, a nonprofit newsroom, is funded through grants and donations from individuals, foundations and organizations.
Mirror Indy reporter Carley Lanich covers early childhood and K-12 education. Contact her at carley.lanich@mirrorindy.org or follow her on X @carleylanich.
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